Friday, July 22, 2016

The suffragette
campaign spearheaded by Mrs Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU)
was a time of heady excitement, courage, endurance and persistence. Women
marched under stirring banners – From
Prison to Citizenship, Deeds Not Words, Ask With Courage (a pun on prime minister Asquith's name). They endured
violence and imprisonment in their quest for justice. They made news – and for
some they also made money.

The
Keeloma Dairy Company was one of the businesses which saw the suffragette campaign
as a marketing opportunity. In 1907 they advertised their “butter substitute”
in the Yorkshire Evening Post with a
stock cartoon image of the suffragette – ugly, mannish and strident. The
advertisement reads:-

The suffragette says she ought to have a
vote. Maybe it would be policy, perhaps not. But what we do know is that when
once ladies have tried Keeloma, they unanimously vote it of a delicious creamy
flavour, and quite equal to freshly-churned country butter.

The Keeloma
advertisement appeared, whether by accident or design, on the same page as a
report of a suffragette deputation to the House of Commons on 20 March 1907.

Other
companies didn’t just use the suffragette campaign to advertise their wares,
they developed products aimed at the campaigners. The Kensington store Derry
& Toms carried a range of hats in the colours of various organisations due
to take part in a demonstration on 17 June 1911. It was, they said, “a unique
opportunity for purchasing suitable millinery for the great Procession”. On Oxford Street,
Selfridges sold blouses, ribbons, badges and “dainty wrist bags” in the WSPU colours –
purple, white and green. William Owen sold white
dresses for wearing in suffrage processions.

Presumably published before the suffragette arson campaign started - and regretted after!

Swan
and Edgar, Burberrys and Peter Robinsons were amongst other stores which
offered clothes and accessories for suffragettes, as well as for non-militant
campaigners of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. The NUWSS colours
were green, white and red. Unfortunately for these stores, their willingness to
commercialise the suffrage movement didn’t protect their windows when the WSPU
launched its window-smashing campaign.

The suffragette
campaign inspired money makers from swanky department stores to “gutter merchants”.
The London Daily News reported on 22
March 1907 that hawkers outside the police courts, where 75 women and one man
were being tried after the violent demonstration outside the House of Commons
on 20 March, were doing a “roaring trade” selling postcards of suffragette leaders.

Alongside
the postcard sellers was one vendor who demonstrated the true entrepreneurial
spirit. Pitched as “Spoils of the Fight”, he sold items harvested from the
women’s struggle to breach the police cordons around the House of Commons. His
goods included torn pieces of clothing, hatpins, feathers, and hair – souvenirs
of the brutal opposition women met with when they demanded the vote.

You
can find out more about suffragette merchandise, including goods sold by
the WSPU themselves (tea, soap, badges etc), in Diane Atkinson’s book The Purple White & Green: London 1906-14
(London: Museum of London, 1992).

See
also Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to
the Suffragettes, Joel H Kaplan and Sheila Stowell (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).

Sunday, July 10, 2016

I'm delighted to welcome Helen Hollick back with a riproaring
blog about women pirates. The latest book in Helen's thrilling Sea Witch Voyages - On the Account - is out now! Read all about Captain Jesamiah Acorne's latest adventures and release your inner seadog...see below for details.

You get authoress, manageress, actress – so why not pirate-ess? The word
might be made-up (and the gender-specific ‘ess’ bit rarely used nowadays) but
they were there, the women. Two in particular are the most famous.

The early eighteenth century was not a good place to be if you were
poor, black, or a woman. For women there were no rights; they were little more
than possessions. No right to law, to decision of marriage – and about one in
four died in childbirth. Mention pirates and Anne Bonny and Mary Read enter the
conversation. Anne was pirate Captain ‘Calico’ Jack Rackham’s lover, Mary Read
a member of his crew, although we do not know if she was initially disguised as
a man or not. We know of them because they were captured and tried in Jamaica.
Rackham hanged. The two women did not.

Anne Bonny

Anne was born around 1700 in Ireland to a serving woman who was in the
employ of lawyer, William Cormac. When Anne was about twelve the family
emigrated to America settling in Carolina. Her mother died soon after and her
father re-established himself as a man of law. He did not do very well, so
pursued a career in a merchant business, amassing a sizable fortune. Anne
married against the wishes of her father, taking a poor sailor, James Bonny as
her husband. Mr Cormac disowned both of them and at some point between
1715-1718 they moved to Nassau.

James was not a ‘good sort’. Lazy, probably a drunkard, he spent his
time in the taverns, employed surreptitiously as an informer. The pirates of
Nassau had been given amnesty from former crimes providing they did not return
to piracy. Informers like James Bonny kept a watchful eye on who broke the
agreement. Anne met Calico Jack Rackham and became his lover. Her husband was
not especially happy with this – understandable – and had Anne arrested for
adultery, the punishment being stripped bare and publically flogged. James
Bonny and Jack Rackham came to an agreement. Bonny sold Anne to him.

Tired of the ‘going straight’ life of boredom, Rackham and Anne stole a
ship from the harbour, put to sea and became pirates, menacing merchant
shipping across the Caribbean. While not achieving a fortune they were
moderately successful, capturing many small vessels. Anne’s name and gender was
widely known, she fought openly alongside the crew and did not disguise herself
as a man, although she more than likely wore male apparel.

Mary Read

Mary was the daughter of a sea captain’s widow, born illegitimately in
England at some time in the late 17th century. Mrs Read received an
allowance for her eldest (legitimate) son, Mark, from his paternal grandmother,
but when he died to retain the financial support Mary was disguised as a boy.
The two of them relied upon this aid until Mary’s teenage years. Continuing to
dress as a boy, Mary/Mark found work as a footboy, and then as crew aboard a
ship. From 1701-1714 she was with the army, still dressed as a young man. Her
career came to an end when she fell in love with a Flemish soldier. They
married and purchased a tavern near Breda in the Netherlands. Sadly, her
husband died and Mary returned to the Dutch army in male uniform. Peace came,
however, and she joined a ship’s crew bound for the Caribbean. The ship was
taken as a Prize by pirates and she was forced to join them, presumably
maintaining her male role. She accepted the King’s Pardon at Nassau, but
meeting with Anne Bonny and Jack Rackham joined their crew and returned to
piracy. The big question: were Anne or Jack, or both, aware of Mary’s gender
identity?

The End of the Adventure

In October 1720 Jack Rackham, his crew and two women were apprehended by
a pirate hunter. Drunk and carousing below deck the men had made no attempt to
defend themselves, while Bonny and Reed, swearing at their comrades to come on
deck to help, fought hard to resist capture. The two women had little chance of
success and the entire crew were taken to Jamaica to face trial. The trial was
a sensation with all the men found guilty and hanged, but both women ‘pleaded
their belly’ – they were pregnant, so execution was postponed until the birth
of the babies. Mary died in jail of fever a few months later, but there is no
record of Anne’s labour, delivery, release or execution. It is assumed that her
father paid for her release and took her back home to Carolina.

It may be fact, legend, or pure fiction, but Bonny's last words to
Jack Rackham as he was led out to the gallows were: "Had you fought like a
man, you need not hang like a dog."

Maybe Anne was relieved to be rid of it all, and settled quietly in a
stabilised role firmly on land with not a single glimpse of the sea to stir the
memories of days that, beyond the excitement of adventure, were maybe not quite
what she was expecting?

Helen Hollick is the author of the Sea Witch Voyages – swashbuckling
nautical adventure yarns, with a touch of fantasy for adults

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About Me

I live in Bristol and I write historical fiction and non-fiction. In 2006 I completed an MA in English Literature with the Open University, specialising in eighteenth century literature.
My historical novels are set in the eighteenth century. To date they are: To The Fair Land (2012); and the Dan Foster Mystery Series comprising Bloodie Bones (2015), The Fatal Coin (2017) and The Butcher’s Block (2017). Bloodie Bones was a winner of the Historical Novel Society Indie Award 2016 and a semi-finalist for the M M Bennetts Historical Fiction Award 2016.
The Bristol Suffragettes (non-fiction), a history of the suffragette campaign in Bristol and the south west which includes a fold-out map and walk, was published in 2013.